Wire Mesh Mothers by Elizabeth Massie Read Free Book Online Page A

and crumpled school papers.
    "Angela," called Tony's mom.
    Tony didn't answer. She refused to answer to that name.   Her mother knew it.
    "Angela!"
    Tony stepped across the tops of the cot and the bed, then dropped down to the floor in front of the closet. She wrangled back the warped sliding door. She had to have something that would make her unrecognizable at the Exxon. The thrill was to do it and to have everyone wonder and tremble, not to be caught. There were several old K-Mart cardboard storage crates in the closet that had accordioned with age and the weight of accumulated clothes and junk. These boxes held stuff that Tony’s mother considered valuable. Tony had been through them many times, had removed and sold a tarnished pocket watch, some costume jewelry, and an old black silk parasol that had belonged to Tony’s great-grandmother. She’d taken the Swiss army knife and stashed it in her dresser drawer beneath her jeans. She’d smashed and then burned the small collection of porno movies and Playgirl magazines she’d discovered at the bottom of the box, a collection that had clearly belonged to her mother.
    Most of the stuff, however, was just clothes. Tony’s first school dress. Judy and Jody’s matching knit baby bonnets. A cotton apron Darlene had tried to hand-stitch when she’d been in Brownies for a half-year. Other assorted outgrown clothes that for some reason, Mam had felt were worth hanging on to.
    One box was crammed with clothes that had belonged to Tony's grandfather. Her mother's father. Trousers, a pair of cracked and musty shoes, two flattened hats, a couple starched, faded shirts, a moth-chewed gray knit vest. They smelled of silverfish and thirty-year-old sweat. Mam, who wasn’t real crazy about Granddad, hadn't thrown them out because she said it was an insult to the dead to do that.
    Tony pulled out Granddad’s box and tossed it onto the double bed. Granddad had not been a large man, unlike Buddy's Gramps who had a gut like a wheelbarrow and a beanbag butt. She put on the beige slacks and drew them up tightly with the old vinyl belt. She added a long-sleeved checkered shirt, the vest and the black shoes. Her feet swam in the shoes, so she found three pairs of socks in the dresser and put them on and tied up the black laces. The socks kept the shoes from slipping. She studied herself in the full mirror on the back of the bathroom door, and then pulled one of the flattened hats down over her eyes. She found the knife in the drawer beneath her jeans and stuck it in the side of her shoe, working the handle up under the leg of the trousers. She tore a strip of cloth off one of the blouses Darlene had left on the floor and used it to tie the handle in place, snug, against her ankle.
    Her mother's sunglasses were found on top of the fridge. She put them on. They were cheap and the bridge cut her nose.
    “Angela, goddamn it!” called her mother from the living room.
    Tony tried to see herself in the window glass over the sink. From what she could tell, she looked a little like herself, a lot like her father. That was good. Her father, Burton, had been a real man. He’d left when Tony was six but that was okay because he didn’t really want to, Mam had made him go. She had found a new boyfriend and told Burton to get out, she never wanted to see him again. Tony understood why he didn’t try to stay. Burton had been a real man and a real man could never have put up with the shit on the sofa in the living room.
    Tony dumped her mother’s black vinyl purse out on the kitchen table and collected up the three tubes of Shop-Rite lipstick. These went into the shirt breast pocket. War paint for the Hot Heads.
    “Angela, you’re in there, I hear you!”
    Tony shoved a kitchen chair over to the stove and climbed up to get the shoebox from the back of the tiny cabinet over the stove. The box was covered with chew marks and inside were little black mouse turds . Also inside were Burton’s revolver